Sunday, July 22, 2012

Water is life!

It all starts with water. With the drought and tough weather, this is likely more apparent than usual ;)

This first picture is of our second generation rain collection setup off of the barn roof.
The plastic drum serves as a diverter to capture the initial water off the roof that has more dust and dirt and divert it from the primary collection tanks. The bottom of the 55 gal drum has a faucet connected to a hose to drain off for plants or stock tanks. Once the initial "rinse" of the roof is diverted the water fills up the drum and then rises to the level where it fill the big plastic water tanks. These black water tanks are 2500 gallons each and they are hooked together to equalize (level) as one is filled from the rain collection system.

Since we've planted so many trees, we wanted to use the pond water to irrigate in the hot Summer. Here we setup a solar panel with a couple of deep cycle batteries to run DC pumps. We used a small charge controller to use the solar panel for charging the batteries without overcharging them. We have one small DC marine bilge pump to draw from a small float towards the middle of the pond. That one fills a 1500 gallon tank. Then we have a second small DC impeller pump that can pump the water to a much higher tank. It can pump up to 100 ft elevation. The upper tank is then used for irrigation and to fill a stock tank for the cows. So far this is working very well and saving a lot of time, but we are checking on it regularly, since it's not yet completely automatic.